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I have been working on TED Corpus Search Engine (TCSE) for about a week to make it more multi-lingual. TCSE 2.0 is capable of searching and showing translation text in 15 languages (left-to-right languages to which more than 1,500 talks have been translated so far).

I think this is good news for many (potential) users of the system, but I would disappoint some of the Japanese users because I have dropped the functionality of advanced search in Japanese. I just wanted to treat Japanese, which was the only translation language available on TCSE of previous versions, as equal to other languages, mainly for reasons having to do with system maintainability.

Since this was relatively a big change and some important bugs were fixed as well, I decided to have the version number jump up to 2.0 from 0.1. I am not 100% confident, though, about the stability and robustness of the new system, which is more complex than before. I might be working on checking and fixing things here and there for sometime. So I apologize in advance for possible temporary service suspension if that has to happen unannounced.

Nowadays, there are ways to access web-services and show/fetch data without using the traditional process of typing in the url to your web browser. What I have in mind in particular is use of productivity applications such as Alfred on OSX and Drafts on iOS. These apps allow you to setup a custom search menu that accepts a snippet of text, creates a query URL, and conducts the search.

So you can set up, for instance, a custom web search on Alfred as follows. Open Preferences on Alfred, go to Web Search, and press Add Custom Search button on the bottom of the panel, and fill in the necessary info into the form like this:

If you don’t have Alfred but want to just see how this URL thing works, just click on the link below.

Now TCSE plays the video right at the time location where the segments starts, with “play video 10 seconds earlier” option newly added. (Requested by Mura Nava)

I intentionally set up TED Corpus Search Engine (TCSE) to play the video at the point 10 seconds earlier than the segment in question is actually spoken. Currently I do not have a plan to change this. But if you want to start the video right at the intended time, change the starting time (in milli-seconds) part of the video URL. Here’s how:

Click on the mini clip icon and copy the video URL

Add 10,000 (= 10 seconds) to the number in the middle of the URL

Access the modified URL

For instance, suppose you want to play the following segment in Marco Tempest’s talk titled “And for my next trick, a robot”:

Alan Turing, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, spoke about creating the illusion that a machine could think.